1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an improved computer system and in particular to computer software and more particularly to web browser software. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for filtering and previewing data.
2. Description of Related Art
The “Internet” is a globally accessible network of computers that collectively provide a large amount and variety of information to users. From services of the Internet such as the World Wide Web (or simply, the “web”), users may retrieve or “download” data from Internet network sites and display the data that includes information presented as text in various fonts, graphics, images, and the like having an appearance intended by the publisher. As the information revolution has exploded, more and more information is available through the internet. However, finding particular pieces of information out of the millions of “web sites” available can be daunting.
One way of sorting through this mass of information to find what is of interest for a particular user is through the use of “search engines”. Search engines are software written to search, among the millions of web sites, for certain key words or criteria entered by a user, and to return to the user a list of links (references to other HTML pages) to the sites that the search engine determines to be most relevant to the criteria entered by the user. Different search engines use different methods of determining the relevance of web sites, but most use some sort of quantitative method that determines the relevance of a site based on how many times the key words appear in that particular site.
Search engines typically return only a list of links to relevant sites with perhaps a short verbal description of the site. Often times, this list does not provide sufficient information to enable one to make an intelligent decision as to whether to follow the link. Thus, the user is left with the time consuming task of sorting through the links returned by the search engine to determine which of these is the best match. Furthermore, no mechanism is present for a user to determine, based on the search engine results, whether the site is still active or if it has been removed. This problem can be seen by referring to FIG. 1, which depicts a screen image of a returned search result from Altavista. Each link includes only a brief description of the site, but no indication of whether the link is still good or whether the link contains an excessive quantity of broken links within it.
Similar problems exist with regard to following links from one web page to another (sometimes referred to as “web surfing”). Often times, users find the information they are looking for by following links on web pages, but the same problem exist here as with search engines. Many times the links will have only short descriptions about the contents of the web page to which they link. Furthermore, many times a web page will contain a dead link and there is no way the user can determine this except by trial and error.
Therefore, it would be beneficial for Internet users to have a tool to enable them to make more informed decisions about which links to follow. Furthermore, performance of web browsing needs to be dramatically improved. To this end it would be advantageous if server based hardware and software could be applied to the task of accelerating and enhancing client customers usage of a domain.